TV Review: Robot Chicken: Star Wars: Episode III

It’s amazing how easily interesting stuff passes me by sometimes. For instance, I wasn’t aware until recently the makers of Robot Chicken put out a new Star Wars spoof a few months ago. True to form, they appear to have done it just to get to it before Family Guy. This was mentioned in the spoof of Star Wars titled “Blue Harvest” when they talked about how Robot Chicken had beaten them to the punch. Then, when the final instalments of both rolled around, Robot Chicken beat them by a few days again.

Robot Chicken: “Star Wars: Episode III” is vastly superior to the latest Family Guy effort at humour “It’s A Trap!” That effort at humour was marred, at least in my mind, by the return of the irritating cutaway to Conway Twitty singing. Robot Chicken‘s rise to superiority marks a turn-around from the time when I wrote “Robot Chicken feels like it they wrote it primarily for people who have short attention spans and don’t like laughing very much, as it’s not that funny”. A couple of things that have contributed to this are the cohesive narrative now running through it, following the life of the Emperor to lend a slightly more sympathetic stance to his life; as well as the 45-minute run-time, which allows more time to go into long sketches.

One of the parts that was good about its predecessors that has been retained for this one is the impressive clout behind the voice acting. They managed to get Zac Efron to play Anakin Skywalker, Billy Dee Williams to play Lando Calrissian and Anthony Daniels to play C-3P0, as well as having Donald Faison (Scrubs) return to play his role of Gary The Stormtrooper.

There are several hilarious scenes in this (but really, most of it will make you laugh out loud if you’re a Star Wars fan), but the absolute best have to be anything with Boba Fett, anything with long-necked Jedi Yarael Poof (who has some of the best lines) and the scene from Attack Of The Clones where Padmé tells Anakin that they cannot give into their feelings (using Anakin’s original dialogue from the film) while she does a striptease. This, incidentally, would’ve made the original film a lot more bearable for the adult fans; as it was, she looked like a dominatrix anyway. And of course, who can forget “PRUNE FACE!”, a sketch that spoofs the amount of non-speaking roles who got an action figure? Hell, George Lucas himself got two.

Appropriately, “Episode III” is the best of the Robot Chicken trilogy and the Star Wars prequel trilogy, and it’s the only one I would recommend paying full price for. And I would certainly recommend buying this one over “It’s A Trap!” Of course, you could say that from a certain point of view, “It’s A Trap!” is superior to this special. But that famous line was supposed to justify a lie on Obi-Wan’s part anyway.